We all know that being poked and prodded for an hour isn’t a fun thing. As dentists, we do all we can to increase the comfort of this experience (and we’ve come a very long way in a short amount of time), but somethings can’t be helped. If you’ve ever walked away from a dental cleaning with sore and tender gums, then you know that it’s not the nicest thing in the world. There IS a practical reason to why your gums are sore after a cleaning, however, and it’s not because we dentists like to make people suffer. Most of the time your bleeding gums mean one thing, someone hasn’t regularly been flossing.

If you’ve ever suffered from an impacted Wisdom tooth, you know that it’s something that you want to avoid at all costs. In fact, a lot of experts will recommend early wisdom tooth removal over emergency extractions. Even so, it’s possible and in some cases even likely that you might have symptoms of impacted wisdom teeth before a removal can be recommended. If that happens, you need to know what to look for and how to react!

At this point, brushing out teeth is second nature to us. We have a routine that we follow each day, get in, get the job done, get out. We don’t even need to think about it anymore, we just do it, right? Turns out some of us may have developed a few not so useful habits that are actually preventing you from properly brushing your teeth properly and could be holding you back from COMPLETE ORAL HEALTH. Okay maybe that’s a bit of an overreaction, but we mean it when we say that improper oral hygiene could lead to a decline in oral health, so let’s “brush up” with these quick tips! (it’s okay to groan at that one).

When you think of the unpleasant things that happen at a dental cleaning, one of the biggest things that comes to mind is bleeding gums. After all the poking and prodding is over there is the inevitable rinse cycle, which for some can look like a bloodbath. These same people might even have the occasional bloody spit after brushing their teeth. This is more common than it needs to be, and can often be fixed by changing a few simple habits in your brushing and flossing.